2014年11月12日 星期三

When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford was a young man, he says he had a cynical view of aging.

"I sort of went through life thinking that when you got to be in your 60s that basically you weren't good for much," Ford tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "That's a younger man's view. I know that the AARP phones are ringing when I say that but now I'm 70 and I don't think that anymore, OK?"

Not only is Ford older, but the character he's been writing about for years has aged, too. Frank Bascombe, whom Ford wrote about in The Sportswriter andIndependence Day, is now 68.

Ford's latest book Let Me Be Frank With You is a series of four interconnected novellas about Bascombe, who is retired from his work as a real estate broker. It's 2012, just before Christmas, and just a few weeks after Superstorm Sandy destroyed parts of the Jersey Shore near where Frank lives.

Ford says for this book, he had to bring Frank "up to date" to make him a plausible character.

"I really got interested in the consequences of the hurricane and I got interested in having Frank be my instrumental narrator in assessing those consequences," Ford says. "So once I figured out how old he would be, then I had to sort of fill in the absences there that weren't taken care of in the other books. In other words, I kind of backed into it being about aging because he happened to be that age."

In the stories, Frank is dealing with the aftermath of Sandy, his aging body, a dying friend and his ex-wife, who has Parkinson's and has moved to a nearby assisted living facility.

"I think these things are surrounding us all the time," Ford says. "We don't have experiences to get over [them]; we have experiences so we can sort of deal with them and address them and have, in some ways, some stability towards them."

Interview Highlights

On writing about Frank Bascombe at a turning point in the character's life

I just thought I was writing about something that was interesting to me that happens in a life. I mean, when you're in your life living day-to-day, I don't think — I'm not sure anyway — if we recognize turning points when they happen. I mean turning points are kind of a term of art, by which I mean it's a thing we ascribe reality to after the fact.

On the importance of houses in his story, especially in the wake of the storm

Half of my young teenage years I spent living in a hotel. Very transient ... people living in rooms and dying in rooms and doing bizarre and wonderfully scandalous things in rooms, [as] opposed to what my father, who died when I was 16, wanted more than anything, which was to have a house — to own a house — to live in the suburbs, to have that serenity, that stability, that assurance that it would be there when he came back on the weekends. He was a traveling salesman.

So for me, houses are full of drama because they're always opposed by the chaos that's constantly inflicting itself on us. ...

For me, houses have almost iconic status. I've lived in lots of houses; I've owned a few houses; I love looking at houses because it's shelter. ... A house is where you look out the window and see the world. A house is where you'll die; a house is where you'll get divorced. A house is where you'll have your most sacred and most profane experiences. Houses for me are critical to my experience and I guess I thought critical to many Americans' experiences.

On Ford's father, a traveling salesman

My father used to leave on Monday morning whistling and he would come back on Friday afternoon whistling. And that always made me think somewhere that between Monday and Friday he was having a good time. ... I thought work was good. I thought work was rewarding; work was satisfying. I have a very good ethic because of that. I'm not a good procrastinator — I just go do it if it needs to be done. He taught me that.

On a writer's legacy

Art is the daughter of time, which means basically you write for the people who can read you when you and they are alive. I'm perfectly comfortable with that. The whole notion of legacy — I think it's kind of a media creation in a sense. We all talk about people's legacies. I just don't think about it. I feel like it's a privilege to get to write books. I feel like it's a high calling. I feel like it's allowed me to take full advantage of myself, with the chaos that goes on in my brain. If somebody reads me now, when I publish these books and write these books, that's all I ask. That's really all I ask.

Professor Richard Ford talks of his latest book 'Let Me Be Frank' and legacy on Fresh Air with Terry Gross - "We all talk about people's legacies. I just don't think about it. I feel like it's a privilege to get to write books. I feel like it's a high calling. I feel like it's allowed me to take full advantage of myself, with the chaos that goes on in my brain." Listen to the full interview here.

Do you think you'll make it to 75? That was the question that the massiveHealth and Retirement Survey posed to 26,000 Americans over the age of 50 in 1992.

Specifically, the researchers asked respondents to guess their odds of living to age 75: 10 percent? 50 percent? 100? Now, nearly 25 years later, researchers can evaluate how well the respondents did at guessing their chances of living that long -- simply by counting how many of those people actually made it to 75.

In general, people wildly underestimated their chances of reaching 75. Seven percent of respondents said there was simply no way they'd live to 75 - they gave themselves a zero percent chance of living that long.

But in fact, nearly half of this group lived to 75 - or longer. Among people who gave themselves 50-50 odds, 75 percent saw their 75th birthday.

Below I've charted the actual probability of living to 75 for each group of respondents - those giving themselves 100 percent odds, 90 percent odds, 80 percent odds, etc., in 10 percent increments all the way down to the people who said they had no chance of living to 75.

But what the Brookings researchers note, with some degree of alarm, is the big gap in most cohorts between their expected and actual lifespans. "Individuals do not fully understand the longevity risk they face," write authors Benjamin Harris and Katharine G. Abraham.

As a society, we are somewhat obsessed with the risks of dying - from car crashes, cancer, terrorists, Ebola, or any of the thousands of mortal terrors that haunt our nightly newscasts. But we're less accustomed to consider the risks of living long - of outliving our retirement savings.

With lifespans increasing and Social Security on shaky financial footing going forward, people are going to be depending more on their personal savings and retirement accounts to support them through old age. In order to assess how much money we'll actually need, we first need to have a realistic sense of how long we'll live. The Brookings study suggests that many of us still have some work to do on that front.

Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.

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“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” said Bette Davies – a phrase that rings true for more and more of us as the population lives longer. And older women – once largely invisible and overlooked in fashion –- have become increasingly central to the style zeitgeist, with fashion directors such as Grace Coddington and Carine Roitfeld ever more influential. And mature women are being cast more frequently as models and brand ambassadors too. The elegant, silver-haired 86-year-old British model Daphne Selfe is in constant demand, and the flamboyant New Yorker Iris Apfel – also an interior designer, whose motto is “more is more and less is a bore” – was recently chosen as the face of hip fashion label & Other Stories.

Its campaign was shot in the 93-year-old model’s home by Ari Seth Cohen, already known for his hugely successful street-style blogAdvanced Style, in which he documents stylish New Yorkers aged from 60 to 100. His recent documentary film, also called Advanced Style, tells the story behind the blog. “I always love working with older people because of their ability to tell a story with a look,” the 33-year-old photographer tells BBC Culture. “Women like Iris Apfel promote personality and personal expression rather than a youthful idea of perfection and beauty.”

Inspiration came early for Cohen, whose grandmothers were his “best friends” when he was growing up. “They were my role models,” he says. And now the marketing clout of the silver-haired style maven has become apparent, it seems. “Brands are definitely starting to wake up to the fact that there is an entire demographic of intelligent and experienced older shoppers that they have been ignoring for so many years,” says Cohen. “Bringing visibility to a new image of ageing…. will hopefully help change our attitudes towards growing older.”

Unique chic

What comes across in Cohen’s subjects is their confidence and strength of character. “Style is all about the attitude that comes along with dressing. Many of the women I photograph have become more confident with age. They know their bodies better, aren't afraid of expressing themselves, and no longer care about what other people think.” So does ageing stylishly transcend fashion? “I think style can definitely be an act of creativity. I look at style as a form of vitality, but there are many other ways to age stylishly that have nothing to do with clothing. Style is how we live our lives and approach each day.”

“Many of the women I photograph have become more confident with age” says Cohen (Advanced Style/Ari Seth Cohen)

It’s perhaps this emphasis on individualism that has made Advanced Style so popular with younger people. As Cohen puts it: “[Iris] comes from a time before ‘fast fashion’, where you wouldn’t come across hundreds of people wearing the same thing. It’s interesting because personal style has really become a commodity. Many of the women I photograph say that everyone is trying to look different these days, yet they all end up looking the same. I agree with Iris’s pro-individual sense of dressing and I believe that any creative act can be a form of personal expression.” Or, as Iris herself has said: “When you don't dress like everybody else you don't have to think like everybody else.”

Older, wiser, happier

British writer India Knight disagrees. “Lovely line, but I’m not sure it’s true. It’s nice to be creative in the way you dress, but it doesn’t mean that more soberly dressed people are incapable of creativity. Mrs Apfel is a fashion icon and quite rightly speaks like one. Ordinary women are perfectly capable of original thought in a pair of old jeans and their dog-walking jersey.”

In her new book In Your Prime: Older, Wiser, Happier, the 48-year-old author and newspaper columnist argues that ripeness is all, and offers brisk, funny advice on the joys and pitfalls of middle age and beyond. She advises against looking “whacky” and “ageing disgracefully”, and roundly condemns the 1961 poem Warning by Jenny Joseph as the worst possible kind of sartorial advice to follow. (The poem opens with the lines ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me’).

Coco Chanel famously said: “Nothing makes a woman look so old as desperately trying to look young.” India Knight agrees. In her book she writes about the “mutton” effect (from the phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’). How would she define mutton? “It’s trying too hard,” she tells BBC Culture. “I’m not mad keen on the idea of a 55-year-old sharing a wardrobe with her teenage daughter.” Equally, though, she is averse to the more ascetic approach, or what she calls the ‘Hampstead Lady’ look (a reference to the north London neighbourhood favoured by the liberal intelligentsia). “Grey bob, geometric, usually Japanese, clothes,” she explains. “For some reason people who wear it feel this look somehow has intellectual rigour. I personally find it quite comical.”

So what can the more mature woman wear, in her view? “Wear whatever you feel happy in. Note, this doesn’t mean whatever you feel most comfortable in. If that worked, we’d all be running about in onesies. I have a lot of love for the onesie but, time and a place. Instead, wear clothes that make you feel uplifted. There’s nothing more depressing than looking down at yourself and thinking ‘ugh’.” So does the author think it’s less important to follow fashion as you get older? “Yes and no. It’s important to do what makes you happy. If you love fashion, great. If you think it’s a baffling tyranny, you’re entirely at liberty to ignore it entirely. The good thing about getting older is that you’re freer of silly anxieties about all of this stuff.” And nor are older women ‘invisible’ as is sometimes claimed. “We are perfectly visible to people our own age, both male and female.”

Vivienne Westwood is a national treasure in Britain with her out-there look (Ian Gavan/Getty Images)

Despite her firm views on what is and isn’t appropriate, the author agrees that times have changed. In western society, ‘respectability’ is no longer such an overriding concern for older women. And though mature women dressing up for fun may occasionally be ridiculed, on the whole they are viewed affectionately – in the UK the likes of actress Helena Bonham Carter and designer Vivienne Westwood have become close to national treasures with their determinedly out-there looks. “We are much more mutable,” says Ms Knight. “We can put on a personality when we put on an outfit, in a playful way.” Something the ladies of Advanced Style know all about. When you get to the age of 94, as one of them puts it in the documentary film, “Everyday living is a party.”

2014年11月3日 星期一

Scottish distilleries are in shock after a Japanese single malt was named the best whisky in the world.

Whisky expert Jim Murray described the Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 as a drink of “near incredible genius”, awarding it 97.5 marks out of 100 in the 2015 World Whisky Bible.

To add insult to injury it is the first time in the Whisky Bible’s 12-year history that a Scottish malt has failed to make the top five drams. It is also the first year that a Japanese whisky claimed the highest accolade.

Mr Murray, who oversees the review that samples over 4,500 different whiskies, labelled the results a “wake up call” for Scottish distilleries, claiming the winner was “a single malt which no Scotch can at the moment get anywhere near”.

The review unfortunately awarded the best European whisky of the year to English tipple Chapter 14 Not Peated, from the English Whisky Company.

After personally tasting nearly 1,000 whiskies, Mr Murray said Scottish distilleries were in danger of churning out drab or mediocre malts and said it was time for “a little dose of humility” from the northern whisky makers so they could “realised something is missing.”

He praised praised the Yamazaki’s “nose of exquisite boldness” and finish of “light, teasing spice”.

Keita Minari, Europe Brand Manager for Beam Suntory, which owns Yamazaki, said: “It is such an honour to be Jim Murray’s World Whisky of the Year. Sherry casks were used to age the very first Japanese whisky over 90 years ago at the distillery. It provides a strong, rich character to the whisky and a delicate sweetness.”

But whisky-lovers may need to be quick. There were only 18,000 bottles of the winning whisky made – and retail in only a few hundred specialist shops in the UK for around £100.